Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300135855)

Explores the responses of a world-renowned landscape design firm to the difficult demands of urban areas

Instilling a poetics of place is a goal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), the famous landscape design firm that has created successful public spaces in some of the country's most challenging urban sites. In these locations, nature offers not so much an escape from city living as a teasing dialogue with built structures. The whole experience is aimed, as critic Paul Goldberger notes, to "make you see everything, city and nature alike, with a striking intensity."

Richly illustrated and handsomely designed, this is the first publication to explore a wide range of MVVA's projects, focusing on the firm's trend toward sites requiring complex technological solutions. Leading critics and historians look at twelve projects, dating from 1992 to the present, and each posing a challenge--such as contamination, isolation, and lengthy public approval proceedings. They explore the process through which the firm researches such issues and how solutions are embedded in the final aesthetics and spatial structure of the sites.

Author: Anita Berrizbeitia
ISBN-10: 0300135858
ISBN-13: 9780300135855
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/01/2009
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 3.55lbs
Size: 11.22h x 7.88w x 1.31d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/15/2009 pg. 95